Curecoin

Curecoin was the first coin that planned to genuinely do calculations that will help human kind. Gridcoin delivered a working decentralized cryptocurrency that rewards folding in October 2013, which does exactly that. Primecoin was the first coin doing something more than perpetuating itself by calculating big prime numbers. Curecoin is taking it a step further. It's based on a shared mining concept, where ~45% the new coins go to ASIC miners doing "useless" SHA calculations and ~45% of the new coins go towards people running CPUs and GPUs that are folding proteines. The remainder goes to a fund to continue Curecoin development.

It remains to be seen if this particular coin will keep up but the concept is amazingly interesting considering that it's profitable to burn almost 3600 BTC worth of energy every day to mine Bitcoins.